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Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology
The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In Tracing Expression in Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, Véronique M. Fóti addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible) . With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy.<!--? prefix = o ns = "" /-->
- GenresPhilosophy
170 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2013
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April 28, 2017
It's no secret that the theme of expression runs like an undercurrent through the vast body of Merleau-Ponty's work, and here, in a series of studies among the first of their kind, we get to see just the scope and breadth of Merleau-Ponty's efforts to grapple with the 'paradoxes of expression' which so haunt his writings. Tracing the conceptual development of 'expression' across Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with art, biology, and the history of philosophy - culminating with Merleau-Ponty's own 'ontology of the flesh' in his late publications - Veronique Foti demonstrates the central, if nonetheless knotty role that expression plays throughout Merleau-Ponty’s wide-ranging intellectual itinerary.
Although less a comprehensive survey with a unified trajectory than a series of ‘local’ commentaries (each chapter dealing roughly with a particular essay, lecture course, book or thinker), taken together, the readings offered within do an admirable job of elucidating the stakes involved in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on expression. Indeed, there is a sense in which essays here are best read as collection of (critical) reader’s guides to this or that particular Merleau-Pontyian text, each with an eye to the place of expression within it. This isn’t to say that Tracing Expression doesn’t have its own narrative arc; only that the studies within can be treated quite nicely in isolation of each other without compromising the insights furnished by Foti.
As far as that arc goes however, Foti follows the Merleau-Ponty scholar Renaud Barbaras in arguing that although Merleau-Ponty only came to properly recognise the full philosophical potency of expression in his later work, that recognition followed from a series of struggles to wrest expression from the linguistic abode out of which Merleau-Ponty drew it from. In his gradual realisation that expression could be generalised into an ontological, rather than merely linguistic category, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ontology of the Flesh’ was an attempt precisely to give ontological voice to what remained implicit in his reflections on language. Where Foti’s book comes into its own, however, is in its illustration, by way of a series of intellectual vignettes, as it were, of just how this realisation took form.
Indeed, as anything but an uncritical reader, Foti is keen to point out instances in which Merleau-Ponty himself doesn’t quite live up to his own insights regarding expression, or conversely - in the case of Merleau-Ponty’s offhand treatment of Spinoza - reject resources which would have allowed him to develop it his philosophy of expression even further. These sorts of critical observations, together with Foti’s ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate regions of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts - art and biology in particular - mean that Tracing Expression lives up precisely to the promise of its name. *I should also mention that for anyone following the ‘biological turn’ in recent continental philosophy (thanks Deleuze…), the sections on Adolf Portmann and Jakob von Uexkull are an absolutely indispensable read.
Although less a comprehensive survey with a unified trajectory than a series of ‘local’ commentaries (each chapter dealing roughly with a particular essay, lecture course, book or thinker), taken together, the readings offered within do an admirable job of elucidating the stakes involved in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on expression. Indeed, there is a sense in which essays here are best read as collection of (critical) reader’s guides to this or that particular Merleau-Pontyian text, each with an eye to the place of expression within it. This isn’t to say that Tracing Expression doesn’t have its own narrative arc; only that the studies within can be treated quite nicely in isolation of each other without compromising the insights furnished by Foti.
As far as that arc goes however, Foti follows the Merleau-Ponty scholar Renaud Barbaras in arguing that although Merleau-Ponty only came to properly recognise the full philosophical potency of expression in his later work, that recognition followed from a series of struggles to wrest expression from the linguistic abode out of which Merleau-Ponty drew it from. In his gradual realisation that expression could be generalised into an ontological, rather than merely linguistic category, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ontology of the Flesh’ was an attempt precisely to give ontological voice to what remained implicit in his reflections on language. Where Foti’s book comes into its own, however, is in its illustration, by way of a series of intellectual vignettes, as it were, of just how this realisation took form.
Indeed, as anything but an uncritical reader, Foti is keen to point out instances in which Merleau-Ponty himself doesn’t quite live up to his own insights regarding expression, or conversely - in the case of Merleau-Ponty’s offhand treatment of Spinoza - reject resources which would have allowed him to develop it his philosophy of expression even further. These sorts of critical observations, together with Foti’s ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate regions of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts - art and biology in particular - mean that Tracing Expression lives up precisely to the promise of its name. *I should also mention that for anyone following the ‘biological turn’ in recent continental philosophy (thanks Deleuze…), the sections on Adolf Portmann and Jakob von Uexkull are an absolutely indispensable read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review